A Markovian Analysis in Domestic Violence against Women in Nasarawa State, Nigeria.

This research was conducted primarily to investigate the application of the Markov model in assessing domestic violence. A Markov Chain (a model also known as Stochastic Process) is a sequence of experiment performed on a system in one of the State; Si, S2 ... Sn> and the outcome of the experiment affect the outcome of the next experiment: the system can change from one State Si to Sj only as a result of experiment. The study area was stratified into three Senatorial districts; each was made up of 3-5 Local Government Areas. At the second stage of the sampling, only households that showed interest in responding to the questions were interviewed. The return probabilities for each phase in each state in the Markovian model were all computed. The study observed that the average number of steps (six steps) for a woman to reach the absorbing state if she starts from any non-absorbing state takes longer time for the violence to reach the resistant stage. At states S2 and S3, the mean number of women not willing to continue with the violence became stable for some time, and later declined as women tried to seek reconciliation. The incident probability had a maximum value of0.8789 initially and began to decrease as the incidence rate increased into the absorbing state; the probability of the violence reduces to zero. At PS4. the probability that the violence was noticed from S3 had a maximum value of 0.8046 and began to decrease as more women became victims of violence due to the cause of the violence; hence the violence dies out eventually as women became more submissive to their husbands. The study concluded that the time of absorption decreases and the